It’s been just over a year and a half since I started working at Elastic as a Sales Engineer. For people who aren’t in the software/tech industry, you may think that’s a weird title. Here’s the Wikipedia definition of the role: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_engineering.
This has been my first job as a Sales Engineer. My career path to this point has been Quality Assurance Engineer -> Software Developer -> Consulting Engineer -> Sales Engineer. I always thought I wasn’t the type of person who could do sales. One of my first experiences with software sales was when I walked through the area of the office where the sales reps sat and saw the quarterly leaderboard prominently displayed on the wall. Right there — out in public — was a near-real-time ranking of who was doing well and who wasn’t. It was a bit jarring to me because at that point in my career, I thought evaluating how good of a job you were doing was mostly decided between you (the employee) and your manager. It didn’t seem right that 1) it was displayed so publicly and 2) your value to the company was judged solely on a single number. At the time, I vowed I would never go into sales. I just couldn’t see how I could ever do it while maintaining my moral integrity and beliefs around how people should be treated. And 7 years later, here I am: a Sales Engineer. What happened? How did I get here?
Believing in your product
I helped out in the presales cycle for an opportunity at one of my recent jobs. While I appreciated the chance to interact with a prospective customer in the sales process to fill in for a colleague, it left a bad taste in my mouth. It was pretty obvious to me that our product was a bad fit for the customer’s project but… the sales rep didn’t care. I slogged through two months of building a proof of concept for this project that was a terrible fit for our company’s product. The entire time, the sales rep kept saying stupidly optimistic things about how we’re going to close this deal. (Sure, it’s great to be optimistic but you can’t just entirely ignore reality.) Of course, we did not end up closing the deal.
I tell this story to say that integrity is really important to me. A “good” sales person is supposedly able to sell anything, regardless of whether the customer actually needs it or not. I just can’t do that. I can only sell something that I really believe 1) is an awesome product and 2) solves the customer’s specific problem.
In early 2014, I was on the lookout for a new job and I discovered Elasticsearch was looking for a Sales Engineer in the NYC area. I was frustrated because I thought Elasticsearch was an amazingly innovative piece of software whose success was inevitable BUT the only job opening at the time that I was remotely qualified for was… you guessed it… Sales Engineer. I told all my former colleagues to apply for the job because this was going to be an absolute slam dunk, not just in terms of financial upside but as an opportunity to get in early to help build one of the next great software companies. But after about three months, the position was still unfilled and I told myself that I’d regret at least applying for the job.
I applied for the job and as I went through the interview process, I met a lot of great people and felt more convinced that this was an amazing company with amazing products. I got to a place where I was really excited about this opportunity, despite it being in Sales, because 1) it was a company with products I could believe in and 2) these products could legitimately solve many customers’ problems and there shouldn’t be situations where I’d have to lie or mislead people into a bad solution.
Help making people successful
Another problem I had with sales was that it was all about closing the deal and hitting your number. I wouldn’t be able to do sales unless I was able to reframe what I was doing to something other that just closing deals. During my time as a Sales Engineer so far, I’ve been able to legitimately think about my interactions with customers as “helping make customers successful”.
You can only really believe that selling is an early stage of leading someone to success if you actually believe in the product, which ties into what I talked about in the last section. Why is sales a necessary step in the process of leading someone to success? Making a decision to buy a particular product is never an independent decision. Even if a buyer tells all prospective vendors to go away and to let him/her make a decision themselves, there is always bias from both explicit and implicit sources, misinformation that is spread intentionally or unintentionally, and lack of time to collect every single piece of knowledge to help inform a 100% “accurate” decision — it’s just impossible and people are fooling themselves to think it is possible.
Sales is necessary to help a buyer have the most accurate information available about a specific product or service and its applicability to the buyer’s needs. Sometimes the job is as easy as just educating the buyer on the product’s capabilities but often times, the process involves correcting bias or misinformation the buyer may have about the product’s capabilities due to a competitor intentionally misleading him/her in order to improve the relative feature set of their competing product. Sales is a cutthroat business and most sales people will gladly lie to help close a deal. Or if we want to be generous, they’ve drunk enough of their marketing machine’s kool-aid to believe that they’re not actually lying. Let’s just say that I’m happy to be at a company where I don’t have to lie to close deals and I’m grounded enough to know that while our company’s products solve many problems, I don’t need to shove them down prospective customers’ throats if we just aren’t a good fit — my time is better spent on opportunities where there is a good fit.
There are many stages to customer success: people in groups from engineering to marketing to sales to support play important roles in getting a customer to success. I can confidently say that I believe sales is an important, early step in that process and playing that role in helping make customers successful is extremely motivating and satisfying for me. If I primarily focus on customer success, I believe the closing of deals and meeting my quota will inherently follow.
Conclusion
I’ll leave you with a story of one of my favorite presales engagements thus far. I had a series of video conference calls and exchanged a few emails with a prospective customer where I helped him figure out how to collect log data from various sources and architect a solution using Elastic to do so in an efficient and scalable manner. This is basically what I do in many of my customer engagements. What made this different was that a few weeks after I had my last email exchange with person, he dropped me an email with a link to a blog post he wrote containing architecture diagrams and a consolidation of our discussions. I thought it was cool he was so excited about what we had developed together that he took the initiative to share that with the world through a blog post. This was a scenario where I didn’t just help lead him to success — but he wanted to take that knowledge and help others become successful with my company’s products!
This is just the first in a series of posts I hope to write about Sales Engineering. Feel free to contact me on Twitter at Peter Kim to offer any feedback. Thanks!
